Early in the development of modem networking equipment such as routers, it was realized that at times a particular piece of network equipment might hang or “crash.” In such instances, a human operator often had to intervene by traveling to the location of the equipment and rebooting or power cycling the equipment in order to get that particular piece of equipment working. Power cycling and information about consumed power are also of interest in a number of computer equipment and other equipment settings.
A number of proposals and techniques exist for performing various types of “power management” in computer systems, such as various APX (Automated Power Exchange) power management schemes. These techniques are generally characterized by fixed operating modes, such as suspend, sleep, hibernate, etc. and either no communication or limited communication with other power management components. Furthermore, computer equipment generally includes one or more “power management” schemes, but these also are of limited functionality.
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